According to an interesting Wall Street Journal piece last week, underground rap is stoking a protest movement in Russia with songs “on such hot-button issues as drugs, police brutality and the immense power of the Kremlin-backed elite.” One of the genre’s rising stars is Ivan Alexeyev, who—under the name Noize MC—drew widespread attention with his song “Mercedes S666″, which excoriates a Russian oil executive for allegedly conspiring with police to cover-up a deadly car accident that he caused.

To a menacing beat, Mr. Alexeyev takes on the persona of the oil executive and raps: “Get out of my way, plebeians, don’t get under my wheels / Tremble, pitiful rabble, there’s a patrician on the highway / We’re late for hell, make way for the chariot.”

The song soon went viral after a friend created a South Park-inspired music video and posted it on YouTube.

To date, the YouTube video has had more than 700,000 hits, and it has helped fuel an outcry that ultimately led President Dmitry Medvedev to order a new investigation. Afisha, a popular entertainment magazine, praised Mr. Alexeyev’s song as “the most effective musical act of civil resistance in Russia for the past 10 years.”

But Alexeyev isn’t the only rapper causing a stir in Russia.

Timur Kuzminykh, who goes by the name Dino MC 47, heaped scorn on Russia’s leaders in a song about the March 29 suicide bombings that killed 40 people in the Moscow metro. Attacking officials with “insolent fat faces” who, he alleges, are more concerned with enriching themselves than fighting terrorism, he raps: “Their kids are in London and their money is in the Caymans / But what are we supposed to do, where can we run?”

This surge in politically aware rap combined with the outreach power of the Internet has led many Russian music critics to hope for an end to the vapid commercial pop of the mainstream.

“The Internet is now a much more powerful media resource in the music scene than television or radio,” the critic said. “We are seeing more and more how certain performers are popular purely thanks to the Internet, without any LPs or any support from the mass media.”

Alexeyev, however, isn’t as optomistic about the longterm strength of underground rap in Russia.

“It will probably become like American [rap], where you have some underground labels producing one thing, while TV channels choose songs for their entertainment value,” he said.

This is certainly a valid criticism. Hip-hop in America is probably as far from its socially conscious roots as it has ever been. Hopefully this is one area where Russia won’t follow in our footsteps.

At 91 years old, iconic folk singer Pete Seeger is still plucking tunes of protest on his legendary banjo. Although he doesn’t write many new songs anymore, the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf moved him to team with folk singer Lorre Wyatt and pen a track called “God’s Counting on Me, God’s Counting on You.”

He debuted the song on two special occasions last week, first outside the senate chamber in Albany for a rally against hydrofracking in New York State and then a few days later at a fundraising concert for Gulf charities in New York City (video above).

The environment has long been a focus of Seeger’s work, particularly in his native Hudson Valley. So it’s no surprise he sees an immediate connection between the drilling in the Gulf and the proposed drilling near New York’s watershed.

In his trademark sing-along style, Seeger moved audiences with lyrics like “When the drill baby drill turns to spill baby spill/God’s counting on me/God’s counting on you” and the uplifting chorus, “Hopin’ we’ll all pull through/me and you.”

After the show, he told Rolling Stone, “I’m a fan of old songs that have a lot of repetition, spirituals… Some of the greatest songs in the world only have one line, like ‘This little light of mine.’ ”

For more on Pete Seeger and the important role of music in social movements, watch the endlessly inspiring documentary on Seeger’s life The Power of Song.

The New York Times ran an interesting piece about the power of protest music in Iran earlier this week, saying:

Since the Iranian authorities have cracked down on the demonstrations that rocked the country after a disputed election a year ago, a flood of protest music has rushed in to comfort and inspire the opposition. If anything, as the street protests have been silenced, the music has grown louder and angrier.

The authorities have also tried their hardest to crack down on the spread of this music, shutting down sites where music can be downloaded and arresting musicians, but, as the Times puts it, “clamping down on music in the digital age is like squeezing a wet sponge.”

Protest songs are downloaded on the Internet, sold in the black market or shared via Bluetooth, a wireless technology that Iranians have adapted to share files on cellphones, bypassing the Internet altogether. Fans have also made dozens of homemade videos, setting montages of protest images to music and posting them online.

Since there are no functioning music charts in Iran, it’s hard to know how huge this phenomenon has become, but according to the Times:

An opposition Web site has posted about 100 protest songs recorded since the election. About two dozen of them honor Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year-old teacher shot at a protest in Tehran in June who became an icon of the opposition after her last moments were captured on a video that has since been widely circulated.

Read the rest of this article »

In Burma (as I recently noted here) hip-hop has become a vehicle for dissent against the military junta. A new article in the Global Post profiles Generation Wave (GW), one well-known group of young Burmese activists who are using this music to stoke resistance.

GW itself was formed after the “Saffron Revolution” in September 2007 when rising fuel prices provoked thousands of monks to take to the streets in protest. Civilians joined the movement, but the military junta cracked down, leaving hundreds dead and thousands imprisoned.

Following the crackdown, a group of protesters, who had been friends since high school, started GW as a way to inspire new activists inside Myanmar. Having analyzed revolutions worldwide and the opposition movement in their country they decided to focus on non-violent resistance.

In two and half years, the group has carried out what they call “action campaigns” almost every week. Their main activities include anti-government graffiti in busy places, handing out pamphlets and writing and distributing political music.

In the music video (above) for their new song “Never Give Up,” which includes images of Aung San Suu Kyi and monks protesting in the streets, Generation Wave members 9KT and MK rap with masks on to conceal their identities. In one scene, to represent the 30 members of the group have have been arrested, the pair are singing behind bars. As 9KT explains:

“We are trying to tell the government, even if they imprison us they cannot stop us fighting for freedom; we will always carry on.”

“We are telling the people that they shouldn’t give up,” he said. “Burmese youth can’t be afraid of the Burmese junta, they need to fight for freedom in our country.”

A San Francisco band called Monarchs hired three Latino day laborers to pose as the band members in a music video for their song “Mexicans.” Both the video and the song pay tribute to the hard work of the immigrant community in the face of a largely ungrateful America. In an interview with the Phoenix New Times, one of the band members explained the lyrics as such:

The chorus of the song goes: “Braceros, you’re the future now/ Everyone says, no one knows what town.” This references the Bracero program, where hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were brought here during World War II to fill a shortage of manual labor (primarily in West Texas). By the 60′s, the program was shuttered, but the idea of hiring cheap farm labor from Mexico had already been established. So fast forward to now, and the literal and figurative descendants of these Braceros are no longer just a group to be exploited. Their numbers are so great, their imprint so established, that they are, by any metric, the future of our country. Everybody kind-of knows this already, and so a lot of people’s response is to look at the issue and say, “not in my town.” But the truth is, if you look around, they are already pretty much in everybody’s town. The end of the song repeats the phrase “14 Mexicans in a van.” This phrase has proven somewhat controversial when we play the song live, but it’s really just telling it like it is. Every day you have all these people coming up from Latin America, using every bit of money they have for the privelege of crowding into a van or whatever, risking all kinds of calamity just to come here and work some difficult job. That’s heroic when you think about it. It should make people feel like John Wayne in some WW2 movie: “that’s the kind of man I’d like to have in my regiment.” But instead, our xenophobia gets in the way and we try to build electrified fences and legalize racial profiling to keep these relentlessly hard-working, self-made people out! What a world.

While there is seemingly little socially-conscious hip-hop in the US these days, oppressed people around the world – from Palestine to Burma – are still utilizing rap to challenge the injustices they face.

The Guardian recently took a fascinating look at how this art form is being used in Burma, where the military regime censors and controls everything, as a form of nonviolent resistance.

Burma has a history of revolutionary music. Traditional protest songs, known as thangyat, were once used to air grievances, both small, against neighbours, and large, against authority. Following the 1988 student uprising, however, the music was banned outright by the ruling military junta.

But hip-hop’s fluid lyrics wrapped in rhymes and youthful argot make it a perfect modern format for subtly spreading an anti-authoritarian message.

One of the most popular and outspoken hip-hop artists is 29-year-old Thxa Soe. On his most recent album, three-quarters of the songs, with titles like “Water, Electricity, Please Come Back,” were banned.

And there are others in Burma finding an outlet for dissent in music. A group known as Generation Wave, its exact membership unknown, secretly records and distributes anti-government albums across the country, dropping them at the tea shops that are the social hubs for Burma’s underground political network.

They write songs such as Wake Up, a call for young people to join the pro-democracy movement, and Khwin Pyu Dot May (Please Excuse Me), the story of a young man asking his mother’s permission to join the struggle.

As I read this, I couldn’t help but feel sad that hip-hop has been so commercialized and co-opted by the mainstream in the US. Given the many crises we face, rap could and should serve as a powerful vehicle for dissent here as well. Unfortunately, there seems to be little new protest music – hip-hop or otherwise – that really speaks to our predicament.

Blurred Vision, a Canadian band comprised of two brothers originally from Iran, just released a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall, part II” with a slight lyrical twist that changes the song’s antagonist from controlling teachers to the repressive Iranian regime. The new chorus supports the many young people who protested Ahmadinejad’s reelection by demanding, “Hey Ayatollah, leave those kids alone.”

The music video goes a little further with its message, showing a fictional young Iranian woman on the run from what appears to be the Basij militia as she tries to upload footage from a protest on her iPhone. The video is inter cut with actual footage taken by Iranian protesters, depicting protesters getting beaten by government forces.

While it’s hard to criticize artists who clearly mean well and care more about their political message than their commercial appeal, there are a couple popular misconceptions being forwarded by this song and video. As we’ve written about before, the role of social media has been greatly overstated—not only does it provide questionable information from a small segment of the Iranian population (wealthy, educated city dwellers who dislike Ahmadinejad’s social welfare programs) but it’s also not a reliable way to organize protests given the government’s penchant for internet crackdown.

Like everyone else trying to follow Iran from afar, the members of Blurred Vision may be (pardon the pun) blinded by their desire to see Iranians win greater freedom and civil liberties to the point where they are overlooking and distorting key facts. In a CNN interview they refer to the June elections as “rigged”—something even the mainstream magazine Foreign Policy says is untrue, citing a recent report from the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.

It’s important to point out these misconceptions because if furthered they could lead to several undesirable consequences, such as the justification for a US intervention or the installation of a new president without the fundamental changes to Iran’s political structure necessary for real change. As discussed in previous posts, the only way the Green Movement can hope to be successful is to support radical reform that incorporates not just the social reform everyone in Iranian society desires but economic reform that meets the needs of the poor.

Salon has an interesting historical piece about Johnny Cash and his battle with the music industry over a song called “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” It seems radio DJ’s didn’t want to play (nor did Columbia records want to promote) a song that detailed the historical abuse of Native Americans like Hayes, who was used and abused by his government as one of the Iwo-Jima flag raisers. Anyone who’s seen Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers knows what happened to Hayes: the unwanted fame helped fuel a depression that led to alcoholism and his eventual death.

Although the song was originally written by Peter La Farge, a folkie who frequented the same Greenwich Village scene as Bob Dylan and others, Cash was the first to popularize it with the release of his 1964 album Bitter Tears, an album entirely dedicated to the plight of Native Americans. While Salon writer Antonio D’Ambrosio brings further deserved attention to a man who devoted much of his life–oftentimes at the expense of his career–to defending the rights of the marginalized, the real fascinating part of this article is its brief history of Native American activism. Although concurrent with the Civil Rights Movement, it was something entirely different… Read the rest of this article »

London’s Telegraph did a captivating profile of folk icon and activist Joan Baez earlier this week. One of the more interesting points that Baez addressed was Bob Dylan’s abandonment of the protest song after his early years:

For her part, Baez was smitten by Dylan’s anthems of protest and social change. ‘It was as if he was giving voice to the ideas I wanted to express, but didn’t know how,’ she would later recall. She began to include his songs in her own repertoire, and invited him to tour with her. They became lovers, and his fame blossomed under her patronage. But once people began anointing him the ‘king of protest’ he quickly declared his abdication, abandoning what he called the ‘finger-pointing songs’ and refusing to lend his name to any cause. The growing distance between her political convictions and his apparent lack of them would eventually become the fault-line dividing them.

In her 1989 autobiography, And a Voice to Sing With, Baez remembers once asking Dylan what was the difference between them; simple, he replied, she thought she could change things, and he knew that no one could.

So who, I ask her, does she think was right?

‘I would say we both were. Certainly for him, he’s right. But he’s not in the business of changing things. He never was. And that’s where my mistake was with him. I kept pushing him, wanting him to want to do that. Exhausting for him, and futile for me. Ridiculous. Until I finally put it together in my head that he had given us this artillery in his songs, and he didn’t really need to do anything aside from that. I mean, he may resent it, but he changed the world with his music.’

Resent it?

‘Well, just because he doesn’t want to think about that sort of thing. He doesn’t want the responsibility. On the other hand, I have enough intelligence to know I don’t understand him, and that’s why it’s so futile to keep talking about him.’

Although, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Dylan is such a pessimist, given his rather withdrawn personality, it is nevertheless sad that he doesn’t see the power of his early work and lost that initial spark, which drove him to the spotlight.

Thankfully, we have Joan, who, perhaps more than anyone other than Pete Seeger, has used music to express a hope for peace and justice. And it’s no wonder why she still feels as though she can change the world:

Someone else asks her if she still considers herself a protest singer. ‘The foundation of my beliefs is the same as it was when I was 10,’ she says. ‘Non-violence.’ If there is something she can do, then she will do it, she tells me later.

Although she was born in Israel to Jewish parents and raised in Ann Arbor Michigan, Detroit-based MC Invincible has a pretty deep understanding of the issues facing Palestinians, as evidenced by the above music video for her song “People Not Places.” In fact, it would be near impossible for any Westerner to fully comprehend the song’s many historical and cultural references without reading her very insightful lyrics page.

Invincible (whose name is Ilana Weaver) says it took years to write the song, but that it was originally inspired by a conversation she had with her mom, who responded to a question about missing Israel, by saying, “I miss people. I don’t miss places.” But given that so many indigenous people were displaced to create the nation state of Israel, Invincible says she came to see “what a priviledge it was to not miss this place and to not prioritize that connection between people and places.”

The song and video then became a product of her recently launched project Emergence Travel Agency, which aims to create “media that resists displacement, gentrification, colonization, occupation, obstruction of movement, denial of the right to leave, and denial of the right to return.”

The “People Not Places” video follows through on that objective. In it, Invincible plays two characters, explained by her website as: “a Birthright Israel tour recruiter, styled as a used car salesman; and herself, subverting the recruiter’s mission by exposing the buried Palestinian significance of each location in the tour.” The video is also interspersed with interviews of Palestinians and people from other displaced refugee communities.

The effect is extremely moving and provocative. But not just because the message is so strong and on point. Invincible is also an undeniably talented MC. Were it not for that fact, her message could easily fall flat.

Her skills have not gone unrecognized. Last year, the Detroit Metro Times ran a cover story on Invincible, calling her “one of the best emcees in the country.” Talib Kweli has also given her a shout out as “One of the most talented emcees I’ve ever heard black or white, male or female…”

Hopefully we’ll be hearing plenty more from her.

Outside a Joan Baez concert a couple nights ago in Idaho Falls, four Vietnam veterans  protested the show with signs reading: “JOAN BAEZ – SOLDIERS DON’T KILL BABIES, LIBERALS DO” and “JOAN BAEZ GAVE COMFORT & AID TO OUR ENEMY IN VIETNAM & ENCOURAGED THEM TO KILL AMERICANS!”

Rather than ignore the protest, which would have been the easiest thing to do, or get into a nasty argument with the men about their signs, Baez choose to engage them in an exemplary nonviolent fashion. According to Daily Kos:

Joan was informed that the men were protesting her concert about an hour before it was due to begin and she immediately walked out onto the street to talk to them.  When she approached, one of the first things they said was “We appreciate the work you did on civil rights and women’s rights.”  They wanted to make that point clear.

She listened closely as they discussed their views.  Primarily, they wanted to express the way they felt betrayed by anti-war protesters when they returned from combat.  Joan assured them that she stood by them then and now.  They had mixed reactions as she explained her actual positions and her support for all veterans, across the board.

The protesters at first were hardened in their position, and it sounds like at different points the conversations did get quite tense. However, Baez’s calm, nonviolent approach to the conflict had an effect:

…Joan’s continuing acceptance of their stories and her willingness to hear them out began to melt their anger.  In a twist that seems hard to fathom, they then asked her to SIGN THEIR POSTERS!  She replied that she would sign the back but not the front of “those horrible things.”  Incredibly, the man with the baby-killing sign replied that he would take her name off the poster if she would sign it.

She did end up signing them, and also getting copies of her book for each of them, and offering tickets to the show, which they did not accept.  She signed the back of the poster about her encouraging the killing of American soldiers – “All the very best to you, Joan Baez.”

[...]

During the concert afterwards Joan dedicated a song to the protesters and said “You know, they just wanted to be heard.  Everyone wants to be heard. I feel like I made four new friends tonight.”

While I don’t know anywhere near as much about Baez as I would like, she seems to really embody nonviolence and understand what it’s all about. Her approach to this potentially ugly situation is something that we should all take note of, especially as the right wing steps up its protest against health care reform and government action on climate change.  It can be extremely difficult and won’t always work, but love, respect and a sincere openness to engage the opponent in conversation is the only way we will ever be able to win over those we disagree with.

To read a wonderful and humorous story that Baez wrote about nonviolence, click here.

Perhaps this should have been posted a while ago, before the Michael Jackson news fatigue settled in, but like a lot of people I’m only now—by way of nostalgic revision—starting to truly appreciate his artistry. Beyond the undeniable excitement of his music and performances, however, I’ve come to see there’s a great deal more to his persona than the paparazzi and our consumptive Western media culture are willing to show us.

For instance, by way of the Times of India, I learned that Michael drew great inspiration from Gandhi* and took to heart his famous saying, “Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” In a speech he gave at Oxford Union in 2001, Michael spoke about his own experience of learning to forgive his father for the beatings and detachment he suffered as a child, taking that all important nonviolent step of loving and understanding your enemy.

I have started reflecting on the fact that my father grew up in the South, in a very poor family. He came of age during the Depression and his own father, who struggled to feed his children, showed little affection towards his family and raised my father and his siblings with an iron fist. Who could have imagined what it was like to grow up a poor black man in the South, robbed of dignity, bereft of hope, struggling to become a man in a world that saw my father as subordinate … My father moved to Indiana and had a large family of his own, working long hours in the steel mills, work that kills the lungs and humbles the spirit, all to support his family. Is it any wonder that he found it difficult to expose his feelings? Is it any mystery that he hardened his heart, that he raised the emotional ramparts? And most of all, is it any wonder why he pushed his sons so hard to succeed as performers, so that they could be saved from what he knew to be a life of indignity and poverty?

He closed his speech with the Gandhi quote and told those who felt let down or cheated by their parents to resist the urge to push away and instead give them “the gift of unconditional love, so that they too may learn how to love from us.”

Somehow, through all his sufferings—at the hands of an abusive father and a parasitic media—he became and remained a loving and forgiving person. And yet, we never grant him credit for this hard work of the soul. All we can do is focus on his eccentricities, and maybe, if we’re feeling empathetic, as we have these past few weeks, we’ll accept them as a manifestation of his lost childhood and an ever-demanding media spotlight. At our worst, when we have no empathy, we dismiss that which we don’t like or understand about him as perversion and deviance.

As such, a man who was all too human—vulnerable to abuse and objectification, sympathetic to warmth and kindness—can never be seen as anything more than a freak of circumstance, a non-human. This is the real tragedy of Jackson’s legacy. May he forgive us.

*Gandhi and King both appear in his “Man in the Mirror” music video, above.

Earlier this month, Palestinians organized and staged Hip-Hop Kom, a rap competition broadcast in the West Bank and Gaza showcasing the talent of local rappers. As Jordan Flaherty, writing for The Electronic Intifada, notes, “Through the use of video conferencing and projection, each city could see and hear the performances happening in the other. Five groups from Gaza participated, coming in first, third, and fourth place.” Although Gazans took the prize, the real victory goes to all the Palestinians who orchestrated and participated in the event which embodied the principles of pragmatic nonviolence. It was a subversive action, daring to unite and voice the angst of oppression over melodious beats and rhythms. It was a bold demonstration of the power of Palestinian youth and their ability to peacefully and creatively mobilize themselves in the face of violence.

I see Palestinians turning toward an art form that was birthed by oppressed black people in the US and I can’t help but notice the parallels between the groups. Hip-hop gives expression to the plight of marginalization and it vocally validates the experience of the oppressed. In the US, we are witnessing the infiltration of hip hop by forces of materialism and greed. In Palestine, the essence of hip-hop still remains close to the root of active struggle and resistance against on oppressive order. Palestinian hip-hop reminds us that the poverty of the South Bronx shares a common cause with the poverty of Jenin. It calls us back to the realization that we are all a people in struggle against the war machine. While we let hip-hop die on its native soil, a drumbeat from Palestine calls us toward a resurrection fueled by the knowledge that our country deprives and exploits its poor at home in order to make war on others abroad.

Palestinians are painfully aware that life in Palestine depends on perception and awareness in the US. Getting back to the roots of hip-hop will situate us at the interface of the international and the domestic and will put us in solidarity with local and global networks of people struggling for change and freedom from tyranny. Hip hoppers in the US must therefore take hip-hop as seriously as the Palestinians do and utilize it as a tool to organize and elevate the consciousness of the nation. We must bring the human face of Palestine to our fellow Americans but in order to do so we have to get closer to them ourselves. Can we show them that we care? Or are we too committed to rapping about money and illusory prosperity? Are we exporting our solidarity or a vain, materialistic outlook on life? Are we representatives of the status quo of imperialism and colonialism or do we chant the fires of resistance? Only we can decide.